White Noise II: The Squeakel

In a recent profile of Andrew Breitbart in The New YorkerRebecca Mead noted that Breitbart "frequently decries racism, and likes to point out that he was adopted, as was his younger sister, who is of Mexican descent. 'I hold in great disregard the idea that somehow her blood and my blood separate us,' he told me. 'I grew up resenting people who would look at us at the table and go, 'Why are those people together?'" Breitbart would like you to think that it's his abhorrence of racism that fuels his loathing of anyone--"those supposedly sacrosanct liars, like John Lewis"--who ascribe racist motives to Tea Party donkeys and Rush Limbaugh, who Breitbart has said he'd take a bullet for, and Ann Coulter ("She is the person that you want to be in a trench with.") Someone whose hatred of racism leads him to cut John Lewis less slack than Limbaugh and Coulter definitely has his own moral code, and he's welcome to it. Like a lot of Tea Party types, what Breitbart really seems to despise is any accusation of racism aimed at a white person, though black people, at least black people in a position of power, should probably be thought of as guilty until proven innocent. It's not clear how such known racists as Obama and John Lewis can repent and redeem themselves, unless it's by going away and letting some ideologically correct white person, preferably someone who's not so tight-assed that he wouldn't get a good laugh out of "Barack, the Magic Negro", take their seats.

The implosion of Shirley Sherrod's career with the United States Department of Agriculture is a testament to the warp speed of the modern scandal-fueled news cycle. Monday, around the time that Mark Williams's status as a Tea Party spokesman was being frantically whited out, Breitbart hit the Internet with a video of Sherrod delivering a speech in which she recalled that, back in the 1980s, she received a request from a white farmer who was trying to save his property from foreclosure. Sherrod, who is black, told the crowd that she wondered how much worse off he could be than all the black people she knew who were in similar straits, and she felt like doing the bare minimum that she was required to do for him, which amounted to finding him a white lawyer, on the assumption "that his own kind would take care of him." Fox News got ahold of it, and by Tuesday morning, Sherrod was not only out of a job but had been roundly denounced for her racism--and her bewildering decision to boast about it--by both her former employers and the NAACP. (Standing in her defense were Roger Spooner and his wife, the farm couple she was talking about in her story.)

In her defense, Sherrod tried to indicate that the version of the video that Breitbart and Fox News had publicized hadn't given the full picture of what she was trying to say, though she didn't do herself any favors by emphasizing that this all happened 24 years ago. It wasn't until Tuesday afternoon that the full version of the video began making the rounds. In the full speech, Sherrod went on to say that, after meeting the Spooners, she realized that she had been wrong to think of people in terms of race instead of purely thinking of them in terms of their needs and how someone in her position could serve them, and how the experience had opened her up. It was a conversion narrative, much like the Florida-born sportscaster Red Barber's story of how being part of Branch Rickey and Jackie Robinson's integration of baseball helped him overcome the racist assumptions of a lifetime, or the story of how the late Robert Byrd went from being a Klansman and an opponent of segregation to having the best approval rating from the NAACP of anyone in the United States Senate. It was the stuff that afterschool specials are made of, and Breitbart turned it into a flaming image of a black racist on a rampage by the not altogether sophisticated tactic of snipping off the ending of the speech and just serving up the build-up.

Is Breitbart too stupid to recognize the difference between what Sherrod said and what he made her appear to be saying, or is he too cynical to care? Given the hard line he take with anyone who's not white compared to the generosity of spirit he extends towards anyone who isn't and is on his side, I have an awful suspicion that he may have thought that, by using selective editing to turn the point of Sherrod's speech upside down, he was trying to make it easier for people to clearly see the real truth: here was an honest-to-God black person in a position of power admitting to having experienced a racist impulse. Who cares that she conquered it; the fact that she ever thought ill of a white man was bad enough that it should disqualify her from holding government office, and probably her continued existence on planet Earth. It's not as if she was a white person calling Obama an African welfare cheat Nazi pigfucker; that would count as an excusable, perfectly understandable expression of "white frustration" in these confusing times.

The most telling thing about this may be the contrast in the way Sherrod described her path in life and the defensive ways that people like Breitbart and Williams justify their pig-headed ugliness. Sherrod admitted to having grappled with something ugly in herself so that she could rise above it. Breitbart has a Mexican sister and is "pro-miscegenation", and Williams, to hear him tell it, apparently marched, or was pushed in his stroller, in Selma, so having proven to themselves that they couldn't possibly be racists, they're safe from ever being suspected of having any ugly feelings and can give voice to ugly sentiments to their heart's content, and even assure us that their friends and allies are free of the taint as well. (Don Imus, getting his papers badly shuffled, tried to save his job in the wake of the "nappy-headed ho's" business by assuring us that, despite his stated enthusiasm for what he called "nigger jokes", he couldn't possibly be a racist because he did a lot for kids with cancer. If he'd had better advisors, he might have at least said that he did at lot for black kids with cancer, though maybe we should be grateful that he didn't boast of all the kids with cancer who he'd cheered up by telling them nigger jokes.) I don't know who besides Andrew Breitbart ever would have nominated Andrew Breitbart as the final arbiter of who is and isn't racist, but I guess it's par for the course in a world where Roger Ailes decides what's fair and balanced and a couple of draft evaders like Dick "I had other priorities" and George Bush, Jr. once got to decide which wars were worth fighting.